ABSTRACT

CONTENTS 11.1 India: Environmental Bureaucracy in a Social System ......................................... 223 11.2 Environmental Bureaucracy in Hong Kong ......................................................... 227 11.3 Environmental Bureaucracy in the United States ................................................ 230 11.4 Explaining Diff erences: A Global Approach to Comparison ................................ 232

References .......................................................................................................................235

Environmental degradation has reached a point of global and universal crisis. Since the formal recognition of the problem in the early 1970s, most nations have tried to respond by adopting new laws and establishing independent bureaucracies. Between 1972, the time of the fi rst United Nations Conference on Human Environment, and 1992, the time of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the number of nations with environmental bureaucracies increased by 10 times-from 11 to over 150. Th anks to the pioneering work of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), most nations today have some form of national policy for the protection of the environment. Interestingly, most of the environmental policies are regulatory in nature. Since bureaucracies are the prime institutions for regulatory control and monitoring, they are automatically at the

center of all activity-winning praise and taking blame. Th e near-global and universal emergence of environmental bureaucracies raises an important question for scholars of comparative public administration: Do these bureaucracies perform comparably? Is their performance tainted by their contexts?